The telephone company had come out to the residential program to do some work.

One of the boys decided he didn't like them.

Theresa remembers him as a rebel, the kind of kid who was determined to make sure everyone knew exactly how he felt.

He had a bow and arrow.

That combination proved unfortunate for the telephone company.

By the time he was finished, there were arrows sticking out of the side of their truck.

It would have been easy to look at the boy and see exactly what everyone had already decided he was.

A delinquent.

A troublemaker.

A kid who shot arrows into telephone trucks.

Theresa saw something else.

She saw a kid trying very hard to get somebody's attention.

So she sat down and talked with him.

There were consequences. Theresa believed in those. He might lose a home visit or some other privilege that mattered to him.

But punishment wasn't the point.

The question was what happened next.

If attention was what he wanted, Theresa told him, then they needed to find a better way for him to get it.

They could give him attention.

He didn't need a bow and arrow to get it.

---

Theresa spent much of her professional life working with young people whom other people had already given names.

Delinquent.

Behavior problem.

Emotionally disturbed.

Some came through the courts. Some came from detention. Some came through the state hospital and had needs that were more psychological than behavioral. Some were placed privately by families trying to find help for a child they could no longer manage on their own.

Most were teenagers, although some were as young as twelve.

Theresa's first long-term program was residential. There were several homes for boys and several for girls, and she stayed with the organization for eighteen years.

She began by working directly with young people.

Eventually she did almost everything.

She supervised programs and counselors. She worked in administration. She wrote grants. She made presentations. She became executive director.

She even did maintenance when maintenance needed doing.

But the farther she moved into administration, the basic problem didn't change.

There was a young person in front of them.

Something wasn't working.

What could they do about it?

---

Theresa had studied psychology and sociology. She had professional training.

But some of what she learned couldn't be taught in a classroom.

Living and working with young people taught her that.

Something that worked beautifully with one kid might accomplish nothing with another.

The mistake was assuming there was one correct way to deal with all of them.

Theresa didn't believe there was.

"We treated them all differently," she says.

You had to understand the particular young person.

How did this kid function?

What did this kid want?

What did this kid need?

How did this kid's mind work?

Only then could you begin figuring out what might help.

The boy with the bow and arrow didn't simply need someone to tell him that shooting arrows into a telephone truck was wrong.

He almost certainly knew that already.

He needed to understand why he had done it—and find another way to accomplish whatever he had been trying to accomplish.

That was harder.

It was also more useful.

---

When Theresa talks about those years, she doesn't claim that every child who passed through her programs emerged transformed.

Her definition of success is considerably less dramatic than that.

And perhaps more realistic.

The question was:

Could the kid handle what came next?

For one young person, the next step might be going home.

If that was the plan, Theresa's program didn't work only with the child. The parents came in too. They talked through the problems that had existed before the child left home.

They worked on expectations.

They worked on rules.

Most importantly, the rules had to be clear enough that everyone understood them and realistic enough that the young person could actually follow them.

Sending a changed child back into an unchanged situation wasn't much of a plan.

The transition itself needed preparation.

---

For another teenager, the next step might be Job Corps.

Then the preparation was different.

Theresa's programs included summer work experience, so they would try to find a work situation resembling what the teenager was likely to encounter at Job Corps.

Let the young person experience it before the real transition.

See what worked.

See what didn't.

Then, when possible, bring in people from Job Corps to evaluate how things were going.

By the time the teenager left, the next place shouldn't be a complete mystery.

There were other possibilities.

A foster home.

Another treatment program.

A return to family.

Some young people needed only short-term shelter care. Others needed months of preparation before anyone could confidently say what should happen next.

At Boys & Girls Aid Society, Theresa helped develop programs specifically around that question.

Sometimes a young person would stay for a month or two while everyone involved tried to determine the best next placement.

It wasn't about finding the perfect destination.

It was about finding a place the child had a reasonable chance of handling successfully.

---

That became Theresa's measure.

Not perfection.

Not whether a kid never made another bad decision.

Not whether every young person grew up to live the life Theresa might have chosen for them.

Success meant they had learned enough about themselves to move forward.

Some would make mistakes again.

But Theresa believed they left with a better understanding of what they were doing and why they were doing it.

They understood consequences.

They had choices.

What they did with those choices was ultimately theirs.

There is something very Theresa about that.

Her father had raised her with a similar faith in personal capability.

You can do anything you want, Theresa. What do you want to do?

Her parents hadn't mapped out her life for her. They exposed her to possibilities. They expected her to become her own person and, once she chose something, to do it well.

Theresa couldn't choose a young person's life either.

She could prepare them.

She could ask questions.

She could help them understand the hand they had been dealt.

Then eventually they had to play it.

---

Years later, when asked whether any particular child stood out from all those years, Theresa couldn't name one.

She remembered incidents.

She remembered personalities.

She remembered arrows sticking out of a telephone truck.

But she resisted the idea that there had been one special success story.

Perhaps that's because she didn't see the kids that way.

They had arrived with different problems, different histories and different destinations.

They didn't need to become the same person.

They needed to become better able to manage the life waiting for them.

That was the work.

Find out where this particular kid was.

Figure out where the kid needed to go.

And then help build a bridge between the two.

After that, the young person would have another decision to make.

Another problem to solve.

Another hand to play.

Theresa couldn't play it for them.

She could only help them become ready for the next step.

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